AppWidgetProvider: onAppWidgetOptionsChanged not being called on widget placement

Question

According to the documentation on onAppWidgetOptionsChanged in AppWidgetProvider: "This is called when the widget is first placed and any time the widget is resized."

However, when I place my widget on the stock launcher in Android 4.2 and 4.3, this method is not being called immediately (only after I resize the widget). I tried it on my own app, as well as CommonsWare's https://github.com/commonsguy/cw-omnibus/tree/master/AppWidget/Resize

Is there something I am missing?

EDIT: The only launcher I have found that makes this method work correctly as described by the Google documentation is Action Launcher Pro; nice job and thanks, Chris Lacy! Why does the stock launcher not work? Anyone else have this issue?

Answer 1

thanks for calling attention to this issue. I will be updating the Android documentation to reflect this.

However, instead of forcing a call to onAppWidgetOptionsChanged() in onUpdate(), we would recommend an approach such as the following:

public class AppWidget extends AppWidgetProvider {

    .... 

@Override
public void onUpdate(Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager,
int[] appWidgetIds) {

super.onUpdate(context, appWidgetManager, appWidgetIds);

final int N = appWidgetIds.length;
for (int i=0; i<N; i++) {
            int appWidgetId = appWidgetIds[i];
            Bundle options = appWidgetManager.getAppWidgetOptions(appWidgetId);
            updateWidget(context, appWidgetManager, appWidgetId, options);
        }

}


public void onAppWidgetOptionsChanged (Context context, AppWidgetManager 
        appWidgetManager, int appWidgetId, Bundle newOptions) {

    updateWidget(context, appWidgetManager, appWidgetId, newOptions);
}

private void updateWidget(Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager,

        int appWidgetId, Bundle options) {

    // Do whatever you need to do to the widget. Include any customization based
    // on the size, included in the options. Be sure to have a graceful fallback if
    // no valid size data is included in the bundle.


    }

    ...
}